Elon Musk, a Poseur but Certainly Not a Poster

By Jacob Weindling | April 2, 2024 | 9:01am

Photo by FILIP SINGER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Billionaires Elon Musk

Elon Musk, a Poseur but Certainly Not a Poster

It measures how far society has fallen that Elon Musk is worthy of a blog for a debuting politics site, but such is life inside of America’s collapsing empire. If that Facebook uncle trapped inside a miniature Stay Puft Marshmallow Man had any kind of sense, he would have taken the free money the government was shoveling into his “car” company and stayed in his lane.

Instead, his dream is to be the world’s greatest reactionary poster, and now we all have to deal with the fallout of the unfunniest motherfucker to ever walk this Earth dominating our digital space simply because he demanded to, and because our system rewards unfathomably rich schmucks like him.

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The story has been told several thousand times over, but it deserves to be told several thousand times again (and has by my finance professors as an example of how not to conduct business). Elon bid a joke amount of money ($54.20 per share) that was so much more than Twitter was worth that the Twitter board was pretty much legally required to take it, fiduciary duties and all. Elon tried to back out of the deal with some nonsense about bots, they successfully sued him into sticking to his word and buying the company before a Delaware court made him. He then utilized a tactic called a leveraged buyout—fancy finance-speak for using other people’s money—and borrowed $13 billion from the major banks to close the $44 billion deal.

Musk spent the ensuing months dismantling the only world he’s ever wanted to live in and renaming it X, much to the chagrin of every person with a rudimentary understanding of SEO and what porn sites tend to call themselves. Now he’s convinced his acolytes that his plan all along was to invent free speech, and the entire Twitter ecosystem has been upended in service of the most gullible people alive. A blue check has gone from a mark of credibility to either a mark of a mark or a mark of someone who knows how to game Elon’s lawless Twitter ad revenue sharing system.

The blue checkmark debacle exposed an entire army of Americans who believe they’re legally entitled to everyone thinking that they are cool and awesome. This was one big exercise in projecting existential dread. They paid eight bucks to Elon for the pleasure of saying they paid eight bucks to Elon, and they received the cultural totem of their dreams that they personally devalued through their purchase.

Twitter is currently worth at least less than half of what Musk paid for it, and in his dispute with the Anti-Defamation League, he (likely wrongly) asserted that Twitter was worth just $4 billion. Either way, the point is that Elon over-valued the company to a staggering degree (because he has proven that he has zero understanding of Twitter’s economics or its value proposition to the media ecosystem), then destroyed most of what value remained by chasing advertisers away in favor of emboldening his army of reactionaries.

Being the only electric car manufacturer in America while getting billions in subsidies and tax breaks from state and local governments sure is a nice business model if you can get it, and Musk was heralded as a business genius for taking Obama’s money for a decade. Now people are realizing that compared to like, actual cars, Tesla’s are pretty shoddy productions, and the discourse has finally awoken to the fact that he may not be the messiah our tech overlords have sold to us.

Elon also accelerated that realization exponentially by being the biggest idiot online.

This would be a good time to highlight the reporting in the Wall Street Journal of Musk’s alleged rampant drug use and supposed ketamine abuse. He defended the latter as not abuse in an interview with Don Lemon that mirrored his Twitter acquisition: he greenlit it, saw it, hated it, backed out, something happened, and poof—there’s Don Lemon again!

I wonder if all this is related, including his usual rapid fire 3 am “wow” posts to the dumbest and most reactionary losers on Twitter.

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I freakin’ hate this guy, man. We’re gonna write a lot about powerful people we hate here at Splinter, and there are figures like Mitch McConnell whose banal brand of evil make him one of mankind’s truly horrific monsters, but at least you could tell there was a fully formed person inside there before father time added the Senate Minority Leader to his undefeated streak.

He knew Trump was full of shit. He knew the whole right-wing media ecosystem is one big grift to transfer more wealth upwards and votes to the right. He knew Libs of Tik Tok and the like are all just lying rubes that the GOP’s capitalist class uses to rile their base up. He knew all of this and still pulled the trigger on everything because that’s who he is and how he correctly understands power.

Elon understands none of these things. He’s the sucker that Trump and Mitch McConnell and Libs of Tik Tok’s scams are designed for, and he buys every last one they spit out, hook, line and sinker. He also just so happens to be one of the wealthiest men on the planet. But hey, that’s capitalism baby! We love how it produces the most fair and just outcomes, don’t we folks!

I will not be moving to Threads. I will read only Elon “wow” posts for the rest of my life before I step one decimeter into the purest form of Zuckerbergian late-stage capitalist hell where there are no humans—only brands. Mastodon seems specifically designed to be so complicated that it maxes out at 10,000 users, and Bluesky seems fine enough, but I spent 15 years curating my Twitter feed and I don’t want to do that work again. I’m stuck on this sinking ship.

Fuck Elon Musk. Fuck Peter Thiel. Fuck Bill Ackman and anyone else who wants to join this constellation of reactionary Silicon Valley dipshits desperately trying to buy a lick of sense they could never obtain on their own. We may have to spend the rest of our lives trapped on a burning planet (that is literally warping time) with the most credulous fool alive dominating the discourse, but at least we can take solace knowing that this whole experience has clearly proven to Elon Musk that he will never get the only thing he wants in this world: for people to like his posts.